Agreement puts sealed cases before one judge

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
1:00 am EDT, Wednesday, June 7, 2006

HARTFORD (AP) - The state's Judicial Branch agreed Tuesday to transfer about 40 court cases that have been kept secret from the public to a single judge to give the media a chance to challenge the decision to seal them.

The settlement, filed before a federal judge in Hartford, resolves a lawsuit brought by the
Hartford Courant
and The Connecticut Law Tribune, which are seeking to find out who had their cases "super-sealed" and why.

In 2003, court officials voted to abolish the practice, but did not retroactively unseal any of the files, which had been so secret that clerks were not allowed to even acknowledge their existence.

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"They wouldn't even tell you the docket number so that you could go to a judge and ask him to review the sealing order," said
Daniel J. Klau

, an attorney for the Law Tribune.

The Judicial Branch had successfully argued before the 2nd
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
that Connecticut's chief justice and chief court administrator, against whom the lawsuit was brought, had no authority to reverse a judge's sealing order.

Under the agreement, each of the sealed cases will now be given a special number and transferred to
Superior Court
Judge
Robert E. Beach,
Jr., who handles complex litigation cases in Middletown.

The papers plan to ask Beach to immediately release the docket sheets in the cases and the names of those involved, said Klau and
G. Claude Albert
, the Courant's deputy managing editor.

"Historically, the public has always relied on the openness of the court system to see that the public's business was transacted properly and transparently," Albert said. "A completely secret court proceeding seems to us to fly in the face of the public interest."

The federal courts have ruled that docket sheets are presumed to be public record, Klau said.

"Right now, we have no idea what these cases are," he said. "There may be nothing newsworthy and that will be the end of it. But the public is entitled to know when a case exists and that it exists. The notion of cases that are so secret that they can be taken off the docket is simply abhorrent."

Connecticut Supreme Court
Senior Associate
Justice David Borden
and Chief Court Administrator
William Lavery
issued a statement saying they were pleased that the news organizations have agreed to resolve the cases in the state court system, "where the interests of all the parties will be protected."